Adding Audio to Google Slides When Your Domain Doesn't Have the Native Audio Feature

Six weeks ago Google announced the introduction of native support for audio in Google Slides. Unfortunately, the roll-out of that feature seems to be taking longer than was initially promised. I have been receiving emails for weeks from people asking me if they missed something in their Google accounts. They haven't. I don't have the feature in any of my accounts yet, either. And, unfortunately, Ed Tech Team seems to have pulled support for their AudioPlayer for Slides extension and add-on.

If you want to add audio to your Google Slides and your domain doesn't have new audio feature, you're not completely out of luck. The methods that I outlined in the following two videos that I published a couple of years ago.

Digital Maps, Collages, and Legends - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where this week the weather was finally nice enough for bike rides, flip-flops, and lots of yard work. And this weekend's forecast has lots of sunshine in it which is perfect for Mother's Day. Speaking of which, happy Mother's Day to my mom, to Jess (Isla and Emma's awesome mom), and to all of the mothers who read my little blog on a regular basis. I hope that you have a wonderful weekend!

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. 5 Google Earth Pro Tips for Teachers and Students
2. 8 Options for Making Digital Maps
3. An Interactive Map of English Myths and Legends
4. Three Ways to Create Digital Collages to Summarize the School Year
5. Twelve Tools for Creating End-of-Year Review Activities
6. 5 Ways to Quickly Create Audio Slideshows for End-of-Year Events
7. How to Add a Calendar to an Edublogs Page or Post

Thank You for Your Support!

• More than 150 of you participated in a Practical Ed Tech webinar in April. Thank you!
• Only three seats remain for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp. Join us!
• Newlearn.io is a new advertiser on this blog, check out their site for standards-aligned resources. 
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been supporting this blog for many years. 

Now You Can Re-use Questions in Your GoFormative.com Activities

Formative is a one of the tools that I regularly feature in my workshop on Fast & Fun Formative Assessments. I like it and use it because of two outstanding features. The first is the ability to collect handwritten responses from students through a feature called Show Your Work. The second feature that I always highlight is the option to add questions directly on top of pictures and documents (watch this video to see that feature in action).

Recently, Formative added a handful of new features. The one that I'm most excited about is the option to re-use questions from previous assessments that you have made in your Formative account. That new feature is called Personal Item Bank. A few other new features include notifications when students change their answers, expanded standards descriptors, and a new way for students to sort the assessments that have been assigned to them. All of these new features are shown in the short video that is embedded below.

A Quick and Easy Way to Create Comic Strip Templates

YouTube, like many social networks, has a little for creators that notifies them of old video postings and significant moments for their older videos. This week YouTube notified me that one of the videos I published three years ago hit 50,000 views. That video is How to Create Comic Strips in Google Slides. In the video I demonstrated how to make a comic strip template and how to fill it with clip art and word art.



If you just need a printable comic strip template for your students to use, you could follow the steps at the beginning of the video above and then just print the slides. The steps for printing from Google Slides are included in the video below.



Learn more creative ways to use Google Slides in my upcoming course, Getting Going With G Suite. 

A Great Google Sites Feature That I Missed This Week

As many of you know, I've spent the bulk of the last two weeks dealing with a slew of copyright issues and technical issues. Those have kept me from doing a lot of the things that I normally do every day. That's why I missed Google's announcement about a new image carrousel option being added to Google Sites. I only noticed it because John Padula was kind enough to email the announcement to me.

Soon Google Sites users will have a new way to create image carousels to include in the pages of their sites. This option will be found in the "insert" menu in Google Sites. Once selected you can upload images directly to your carousel or import images that already exist in your Google account. You'll be able to drag-and-drop images into the sequence in which you want them to appear. And as you might expect, you can set the carousel to automatically play.

The new Google Sites image carousel option is available now in some G Suite domains. The feature will be available to all users in the next couple of weeks.

Applications for Education
The image carousel option could be a good one for students to use to include a set of pictures within a Google Sites they build as digital portfolios of their work.